as mitigating the emergence of Brittonic English or as the direct cause of the Northern language innovations i.e. Middle English creole hypothesis. Tristram argues that contact with both Brittonic and Norse speakers explains the language innovations in texts from Northern England. The attrition in word endings, as witnessed by the loss of the nasal endings (m,n), began before the Norse invasion. Innovations in the Northern zone texts associated by Tristram with Brittonic influence: Old English had case and gender word endings for nouns, pronouns and adjectives while at the time Brittonic did not have these endings. The endings in English were lost. Old English had several versions of the word the while at the time Brittonic only had one. The variations of the were lost in English. The lack of different forms of the is an unusual language feature shared only by Celtic and English in this region. English developed a fixed word order, which was present earlier in Brittonic However, Millar argues that “in all of the modern Germanic languages, there has been some movement away from a synthetic towards an analytic typology ... it can therefore be suggested that the changes involved are ‘hard-wired’ in all the Germanic languages ...” He concludes that Norse is the most likely origin for the losses, based on the geographical distribution of the initial stages of change correlating strongly with Viking settlement patterns. Insley considers the native word-initial stress pattern in Old English to be a reason for the loss. Innovations in the South Western zone texts: Rise of the periphrastic aspect, particularly the progressive form (i.e. BE verb-ing: I am writing, she was singing etc.). The progressive form developed in the change from Old English to Middle English. Similar constructs are rare in Germanic languages and not completely analogous. Celtic usage has chronological precedence and high usage. Celtic Englishes employ the structure more than Standard English. E.g. "It was meaning right the opposite", Manx English Other linguists have demonstrated that this form likely arose from two constructions that were used fairly rarely in Old and Early Middle English. The first used a form of beon/wesan (to be/to become) with a present participle (-ende). This construction has an analogous form in Dutch. The second used beon/wesan, a preposition, and a gerund (-unge), and has been variously proposed as being influenced by similar forms in Latin and French or Brittonic, though evidence one